Keir Starmer was knighted in 2014 for his previous work as the director of public prosecutions (DPP). In the role, the now Labour Party leader headed up the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) – the government agency responsible for conducting criminal prosecutions in England and Wales.
Starmer was the first person in his family to go to university, studying law at Leeds and then at Oxford. He became a qualified barrister in 1987 and went on to work primarily on human rights issues.
His five years at the helm of the CPS started in 2008. During his tenure, Starmer worked on cases including the successful prosecution of two men for the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993.
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He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath "for services to law and criminal justice" in 2014, after the conclusion of his DPP term. He is therefore entitled to be addressed as Sir Keir Starmer but prefers not to use the title.
Deciding to move from law into politics aged 52, Starmer was elected the Labour MP for Holborn and St Pancras in central London at the 2015 general election. He quickly joined and then quit Jeremy Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet in the space of nine months, before rejoining the front bench as Shadow Brexit Secretary in 2016.
Labour's heavy defeat at the 2019 general election saw Starmer elected to replace Corbyn as party leader the following summer. He has been Leader of the Opposition ever since, often seen going head-to-head with Boris Johnson at the weekly Prime Minister's Questions.
